'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love
letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I
couldn't resist making him a Life.' Throughout her
career, Woolf invokes the animal world both directly and
metaphorically. She started to write a biography of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel after finishing The
Waves, tracing the life of the spaniel from his country
origins, his puppyhood spent with the writer Mary
Mitford, through his sheltered existence with Elizabeth
Barrett in her sick room, and later travels in Florence.
But Flush is much more than a playful writer's holiday.
As well as offering an exploration of a life of the
senses free from the tyranny of words, Flush can be read
as an allegorical testimony to the inscrutable,
discarded, unrepresentable lives of the Victorian women
poets, who were barely discussed or read in the 1930s.
From a quite literally low point of view, Woolf explores
class and gender in Victorian London, with gently
mocking humour. Charming yet also radical, Flush is a
work of sensuous imagination, an apparently light text
that opens up a range of questions concerning difference
which are woven through the whole of Woolf's
writing.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford
World's Classics has made available the widest range of
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